Virginia Richards has always been drawn to the water.
“I am an open water swimmer,” Richards said. “I love open water. I swim in creeks, in the ocean. Tidal creeks are especially pristine, natural, and quiet. There are no people, no motorboats. You get a sense that you’re in a really natural space.”
About a decade ago, Richards—who grew up in Charlotte and lives there still—was swimming in a South Carolina creek when she was struck with a question: How did this channel come to be?
“It was really remote and really organic,” she said. “There was sea grass, and the channel was a mixing zone where salt water was coming in and mixed with fresh water. There’s a little bit of movement. The water’s cool. It’s lovely swimming.”
Richards asked her friend what the name of the waterway was and was told it was called “New Cut.”
“I thought, ‘That’s an odd name,’” Richards said. “Most waterways are named indigenous names. And I asked myself: ‘What is this place?’”
For months, Richards researched the area’s waterways, looking for references to New Cut.
“I would go out to the land and swim and walk along the waterway and then come back to microfiche and old maps,” she said. “I was going back and forth between history, going between the past and present.”
Then, she found it. In old documents, she discovered that New Cut hadn’t formed naturally. It was created by enslaved men, who excavated the channel in 1702.
Soon, Richards discovered a whole network of similar canals—or cuts as they had been called—that had been created by enslaved people in the early 18th century. The colonial government mandated the cutting of about a dozen canals in South Carolina to sustain water-based transportation. Those waterways eventually supported much of Charleston’s economy. In the decades that followed, those same passages served as routes to escape slavery.
“I was like, ‘Oh my god, this waterway I was swimming in was created by enslaved people 300 years ago,’” Richards said. “This was really interesting and horrific.”
In the ensuing months, Richards photographed the canals, eventually turning the work into a project called The Inner Passage, which connected the waterways with the descendants of the land and the surrounding landscape. In 2022, Smithsonian Magazine published some of Richard’s photos, and the project was awarded “best in print and digital journalism” by the American Society of Magazine Editors.
Now, Richards is showcasing more of that work in a book titled The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway, published earlier this month. On April 25, Richards will speak about the book at the International Civil Rights Center & Museum.
“Part of the motivating factor for me was realizing that this whole history—both the creation of the canals, their use, the inner passage, the amazing agency of the enslaved people who used it to flee—had been lost,” Richards said. “It had been silenced; it wasn’t in history books.”
‘Crossing Boundaries’
After learning about New Cut, Richards decided to document the waterway to tell its complex history. But the photos fell flat.
“I had documented everything, but it wasn’t conveying the emotion and the tenor of what the land was holding,” Richards said. “This ancient history.”
That’s when she discovered photographer Tomas van Houtryve’s work on wet plate collodion. Taken using metal or glass plates one at a time, the process yields painterly, textural photos—exactly what Richards wanted to convey. She reached out to Houtryve, flew to Paris where he’s based, and spent three days learning the process. Then she went back to the water.
“Wet plate collodion is a process that is very slow,” Richards said. “You have to set up a dark room for every shot. You develop the plate right there before it gets dry.”
Each shot takes an hour to develop, minimum. She spent more time on the land and water. She began to meet people who lived nearby. That uncovered yet another layer of context.
“I realized that the people I was meeting had traced their own ancestry back as old as the trees,” she said. “Two hundred to 300 years. Their ancestors had come to this place along the waterway years ago.”
One woman, Kathy Holmes, has traced her family lineage back 150 years to Hester Fludd, an enslaved woman who was freed in emancipation. Holmes still lives on the water and fishes there with her brother. But it wasn’t until Richards met her that Holmes realized how and why the waterway had come to be.
“Most of [the people I photographed] didn’t understand the scope of the waterway,” Richards said. “They didn’t know that the place they worked or lived beside had all of this history.”
Micah LaRoche has lived and worked on Wadmalaw Island in South Carolina his entire life. As a waterman, he was taught by elders before him, and he taught his children and grandchildren to work at the same fishery.
Uncovering this history and sharing it with the people who live there added another layer to the project, Richards said.
“It had that same quality of crossing boundaries between past and present,” she said. “Learning about people’s histories and their family’s connection to the land and the waterways gave the land a further voice that felt authentic.”
The book features 60 photographs, 20 of which are portraits of people living near the waterway. Both LaRoche and Holmes are featured in the book.
Immortalizing this history is important, Richards said.
“As a lifelong Southerner, I really understand the Southern code of silence,” Richards said. “Where people are reluctant to speak or learn about things or racial violence in the past of their city or their land.”
As a photographer and a historian, Richards said, it’s important to confront these histories to reach a greater truth.
“The reason why this history isn’t known is because all the documents were written by white men,” she said. “They just completely disregarded the history of the Black enslaved people who were creating all of this infrastructure for their communities and colonies.”
Now, Richards said, her goal is to spread the history and, hopefully, let the images tell the story.
“I felt like in some ways, the land had held its history but really needed to speak,” she said. “The hope is that visual images can become interesting and engaging enough to ask people to engage with that history.”